Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category:
MythTv Theme installation
Now that I have Knoppmyth up and running for more than .78 days I have had a chance to mess around with some of its features. I must say I definatly underestimated it. Anyway the thing I have today is how to install a new theme in MythTv. The one I chose is ProjectGreyhem because it is the closest to my modded xbox skin that I have now.
I am taking these instructions directly from the ProjectGrehem site because this is exactly hew it worked for me. It is really nice to have things work as they should!!
It is very easy to install Project Grayhem or Project Grayhem Wide
- Download the tarball
- Copy it to /usr/share/mythtv/themes
N.B.: Check where themes are stored on your installation as themes can be stored at /usr/local/share/mythtv/themes depending on your distro.- Unpack the tarball with: tar -xvjpf Project-Grayhem-foo.bz2
- Your new MythTV Theme should now be ready to use.
- Either theme should work with MythTV 0.20
Thanks a lot to whoever maintains this skin (I couldn’t find any credits)
Just in case anyone is wondering “download the tarball” means to use the wget command (make sure you are saving it in a directory you can write to).
and the “tar -xvjpf Project-Grayhem-foo.bz2″ actually means to type in whichever version you downloaded. To make it really easy just type “tar -xvjpf Project<tab>” in the correct folder as root.
Leave a comment if you have any problems.
Mythstream
Mythstream allows you to stream your recordings (and if you can get it to work) and live tv a-la slingbox replacement. I am having my own problems just getting it to play my recordings for more than 3-4 seconds at a time unfortunately. For some reason it will play the stream just fine for about 3 seconds and then just freezes. If I pause video lan and play again it plays for another 3 seconds. I am looking for a solution but until I find one I may just be stuck watching my recordings at home 
One thing I did notice was that the controls for mythstream didn’t work with knoppmyth. I found a quick post by craigtv in the forums that gets those controls working. Here is what he said that got my controls working.
Edit the following files ….
/usr/share/mythtv/mythweb/modules/streamtv/tmpl/default/selectstream.php
/usr/share/mythtv/mythweb/modules/streamtv/tmpl/default/createfile.phpin both files, find occurrences of this path …
/usr/share/mythstreamtv/
and replace it with …
/myth/streamtv/
You’ll need to do the same thing to the same named files in the …/compact directory as well if you use that template.
In addition, I found the path to the ivtv-tune binary in this file …
/myth/streamtv/ivtv-tune.sh
needs to be changed from…
/usr/bin/ivtv-tune
to…
/usr/local/bin/ivtv-tune
That makes the channel change command go thru, but I haven’t yet figured out what it’s supposed to do. I’d love to hear if anyone gets Live TV streaming, as it looks like that’s what it’s for.
That is all for now. I hope you enjoy.
Knoppmyth
I am back at it. I decided to install my PVR-150 tuner into my frontend and install Knoppmyth to make things easy on myself. Knoppmyth came out with a update (R5E50) recently which adds mythtv 0.20 with all the plugins I could ever want. Sure I had mythtv 0.20 installed under Ubuntu but I didn’t have all the plugins and skins that Knoppmyth has.
After install I went through the basic setup, added the card, scanned for channels, and watched some tv. I scheduled a recording and waited for it to finish.
The only things I have changed so far was I added my user name to /etc/group so my user can use the su command and I added the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that the resolution was 720p (instead of 800×600) on my tv. I added the following modeline to the monitor section of the xorg.conf file.
# 1280x720 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 44.76 kHz; pclk: 74.48 MHz Modeline "1280x720_60.00" 74.48 1280 1336 1472 1664 720 721 724 746 -HSync +Vsync
Then I added “1280x720_60.00″ to the screen section.
That is all I have done so far and I can watch, record, and schedule recordings as much as I want. Now I just wish I didn’t install on a 20 gig hard drive. I am going to run out of space fast.
Mythtv with Ubuntu
Mythtv 0.20 is working great with Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 right now! Here is the trick, HD takes a lot of processing power!!! I tried with a couple of P4 2.4 boxes but I could not get things to tune and I could not get things to play. Here is a tutorial that I have been using to get this set up multiple times.
I finally stepped up and tried this whole set-up on a P4 3.2. Yes, it is faster than my current desktop but it works so well I don’t know if I even care. Shortly after setting up Mythtv (and getting the frontend to actually show up) I started scanning for channels. My Fusion card did a pretty good job scanning channels in QAM 256 and actually got 5-6 HD channels. Shortly after the scan I went back into the frontend to make sure I could watch the shows and they worked pretty well (not flawless but I defiantly was watching HD). The next hurdle to overcome is being able to record shows. Recording works without a problem but the station information (what shows are playing at what times, etc.) was not working. So now that is what I am trying to do. Get some information on channels (although channel 2 works fine).
Here are the steps I am taking to make a custom channels.conf file. Using the tutorial above install the nessessary tools
sudo apt-get install dvb-utils dvbstream sudo apt-get install gxine mplayer
Then scan for some channels
sudo -s -H mkdir /root/.tzap scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/atsc/us-Cable-Standard-center-QAM256 > /root/.tzap/channels.conf
Just to make sure I got all the channels I needed I repeated the last scan step with a few other options. You can find all the options for scanning by just doing
ls -a /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/atsc
To be honest I have no idea if this is going to work. I am still scanning channels. I sure hope it does though. For now here are a couple other links that are helping me figure out this whole custom channels.conf file.
Until I finish all of these scans, wish me luck!
xlink kai
This is yet another post for myself to be able to replicate this setup at another time.
The background to this is that I used to always use xbox connect to play halo 1 online. It is a great system made by a great guy (woot Todd!). I was involved with the community for a really long time but recently I switched over to the dark side (xlink kai) because of their support for multiple operating systems and their connectivity with modded xbox’s. I was setting up xlink on my mythtv box (which actually seems to be working mostly) and I just wanted to post instructions on how to get it to work if I ever have to reformat.
Basically just download the tar.bz file from www.teamxlink.com and extract the file. Open kaid.conf with a text editor and adjust settings as needed. Once the settings are all done copy the kaid.conf file to the /etc folder and then the kaid file to /usr/bin. Now to run the xlink server simply type “sudo kaid” in a terminal. (or set it to run at start up).
Connecting from xbox media center is easy. Just go to the settings and then “My Programs”. Turn on the service and put in your user name and login information. After that everything in controlled from the xbox. It is a great system and I now can play halo 1 online without ever needing to touch a controller.
I hope this helps.
I haven’t had a chance to go through this script but I also saw this in the forums for running kai via a startup script. Enjoy.
Building Myth
Whenever I grab Mythtv source I need to have certian flags set. Here are the flags I use
–enable-xvmc-pro
–enable-dvb
–enable-proc-opt
I hope to find out what all of these do (in more detail than I know now) and when I find out I will put that here. Until then here are the rest of the flags that I could find.
–enable-firewire
–enable-xvmc-vld
Honestly that is all I could find. I may add to this later but for now this is all I got.
What I have tried… (part 1)
I started my Mythtv building with a Haugpauge 500 tuner card, 20 gb hard drive, and knppmyth. at the time the ivtv drivers for hauggpauge tuner cards was not very mature and could not handle the haugepauge 500 cards very well. The haugepauge tuner also did not fit in the computer that I wanted it to fit in. One bonus to this tuner was the fact that it also had a built in FM tuner for raido signals. I really didn’t care about this feature but I thought it was a nice addition.
Knoppmyth was easier than I could have ever imagined to install and set up but it did not include support for the Haugpauge 500 card that I was trying to use. One problem I had with knoppmyth was because most steps were done for me I had no idea how to add my own things or edit certian files to make it the way I wanted it. It was kinda like picking up someone elses project and trying to make it your own.
I attempted to use Mythdora which is very similar to Knoppmyth but instead of using Debian it used Fedora Lunix. I was told that it was a little bit more “state of the art” with its driver support but I found that I did not like Fudora as much as I liked Debian.
After trying the self installers I decided I would just try and build Mythtv myself from scratch. I mean how hard could it be? I started with Debian Sarge. I got Debian installed and then started reading documentation on how to get the newest ivtv drivers installed, media programs, and Mythtv.
I quickly gave up on Debian because, well, because there was to much documentation to read. I didn’t have time to read book upon book of documentation I just wanted to get mythtv working. At this point I took my first break from Mythtv. Things looked too difficult so I put it on the side for a month to figure out what I was going to do.
Worklog
I have been working on Mythtv for over a year. I am making a worklog of what I have done to get the installation working. I will start this series of posts with what hardware I will making my Mythtv box with.
The computer I will be using is a HP Evo D510
My particular computer has a 1.8 Pentium 4 processor, 512 mb DDR ram, 40 gb hard drive.
The extra hardware I have added to the computer are Nvidia 6200 video card, Turtle beach audio advantage micro (for optical audio), and a DIVICO Fusion HDTV gold 5 plus tuner card.
My purpose for this computer is to be able to watch and record HD shows and also play DVD’s and listen to music. I did not think that would be a daunting task but I have found differently along the way. My main goal for this computer is to allow the watching of TV, listening of music, and watching movies to be seemless and easy. I do not want to have to change inputs on my tv, turn on my receiver, or turn on my computer to do what I want it to do.
The OS I will be using is Kubuntu 6.06. The software I am using to control the HD watching and recording is Mythtv. I hope to let Mythtv control the music and DVD’s also but that is not required.
One catch to all of this is I am not a advanced Linux user. I have not been using Linux my whole life and I have never compiled my own kernel. I have been playing around with Linux in the form of live cd’s for about 3 years and I think with tutorials that already exist and irc rooms I can make this computer work exactly how I want it to.
I will try to keep this as up to date as I can with failures and progress so that anyone else with similar hardware or similar goals can join in my struggle.